Random Articles (Page 179)
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π Iridogorgia Chewbacca
Iridogorgia chewbacca is a species of deep-sea bamboo coral in the family Chrysogorgiidae. Named after the Star Wars character Chewbacca due to its long, flexible, "hairy" branches that evoke the Wookiee's fur, the species was formally described in 2025. It inhabits rocky seafloors in the tropical western Pacific Ocean at depths exceeding 400 meters, where it forms solitary colonies up to 1.2 meters tall.
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- "Iridogorgia Chewbacca" | 2025-10-06 | 10 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Centennial Light
The Centennial Light is the world's longest-lasting light bulb, burning since 1901, and almost never switched off. It is at 4550 East Avenue, Livermore, California, and maintained by the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department. Due to its longevity, the bulb has been noted by The Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, and General Electric.
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- "Centennial Light" | 2019-07-13 | 40 Upvotes 20 Comments
π Toxic squash syndrome
Cucurbitacin is a class of biochemical compounds that some plants β notably members of the pumpkin and gourd family, Cucurbitaceae β produce and which function as a defence against herbivores. Cucurbitacins are chemically classified as triterpenes, formally derived from cucurbitane, a triterpene hydrocarbon β specifically, from the unsaturated variant cucurbit-5-ene, or 19(10β9Ξ²)-abeo-10Ξ±-lanost-5-ene. They often occur as glycosides. They and their derivatives have been found in many plant families (including Brassicaceae, Cucurbitaceae, Scrophulariaceae, Begoniaceae, Elaeocarpaceae, Datiscaceae, Desfontainiaceae, Polemoniaceae, Primulaceae, Rubiaceae, Sterculiaceae, Rosaceae, and Thymelaeaceae), in some mushrooms (including Russula and Hebeloma) and even in some marine mollusks.
Cucurbitacins may be a taste deterrent in plants foraged by some animals and in some edible plants preferred by humans, like cucumbers and zucchinis. In laboratory research, cucurbitacins have cytotoxic properties and are under study for their potential biological activities.
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- "Toxic squash syndrome" | 2022-07-09 | 64 Upvotes 51 Comments
π Magnetocapacitance
Magnetocapacitance is a property of some dielectric, insulating materials, and metalβinsulatorβmetal heterostructures that exhibit a change in the value of their capacitance when an external magnetic field is applied to them. Magnetocapacitance can be an intrinsic property of some dielectric materials, such as multiferroic compounds like BiMnO3, or can be a manifest of properties extrinsic to the dielectric but present in capacitance structures like Pd, Al2O3, and Al.
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- "Magnetocapacitance" | 2020-04-26 | 20 Upvotes 6 Comments
π In-Q-Tel: The CIA's for-profit venture capital firm
In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability. The name, "In-Q-Tel" is an intentional reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond.
The firm is seen as a trend-setter in the information technology industry, with the average dollar invested by In-Q-Tel in 2012 attracting nine dollars of investment from other companies.
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- "In-Q-Tel" | 2013-06-16 | 12 Upvotes 3 Comments
π Tibia (1997) is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs
Tibia is a 1997 massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed and published by CipSoft. It is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs, with a popularity that peaked in 2007. It is a free game to download and play, though players may pay to upgrade to a premium account, granting substantial in-game benefits. Tibia is a two-dimensional tile-based game set in a fantasy world with pixel art graphics and a top-down perspective.
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- "Tibia (1997) is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs" | 2022-02-13 | 161 Upvotes 105 Comments
π Buy Nothing Day
Buy Nothing Day (BND) is an international day of protest against consumerism. In North America, the United Kingdom, Finland and Sweden, Buy Nothing Day is held the day after U.S. Thanksgiving, concurrent to Black Friday; elsewhere, it is held the following day, which is the last Saturday in November. Buy Nothing Day was founded in Vancouver by artist Ted Dave and subsequently promoted by Adbusters, based in Canada.
The first Buy Nothing Day was organized in Canada in September 1992 "as a day for society to examine the issue of overconsumption." In 1997, it was moved to the Friday after American Thanksgiving, also called "Black Friday", which is one of the ten busiest shopping days in the United States. In 2000, some advertisements by Adbusters promoting Buy Nothing Day were denied advertising time by almost all major television networks except for CNN. Soon, campaigns started appearing in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Austria, Germany, New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Norway and Sweden. Participation now includes more than 65 nations.
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- "Buy Nothing Day" | 2021-11-26 | 50 Upvotes 3 Comments
- "Buy Nothing Day" | 2016-11-25 | 27 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Norsk Data
Norsk Data was a (mini-)computer manufacturer located in Oslo, Norway. Existing from 1967 to 1992, it had its most active period in the years from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. At the company's peak in 1987 it was the second largest company in Norway and employed over 4,500 people.
Throughout its history Norsk Data produced a long string of extremely innovative systems, with a disproportionately large number of world firsts. Some examples of this are the NORD-1, the first minicomputer to have memory paging as a standard option, and the first machine to have floating-point instructions standard, the NORD-5, the world's first 32-bit minicomputer (beating the VAX, often claimed the first, by 6 years)
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- "Norsk Data" | 2020-05-06 | 301 Upvotes 91 Comments
π A Dog of Flanders
A Dog of Flanders is an 1872 novel by English author Marie Louise de la RamΓ©e published with her pseudonym "Ouida". It is about a Flemish boy named Nello and his dog, Patrasche and is set in Antwerp.
In Japan, Korea and the Philippines, the novel has been an extremely popular children's classic for decades and has been adapted into several Japanese films and anime. Since the 1980s, the Belgian board of tourism caught on to the phenomenon and built two monuments honoring the story to please East-Asian tourists. There is a small statue of Nello and Patrasche at the Kapelstraat in the Antwerp suburb of Hoboken, and a commemorative plaque in front of the Antwerp Cathedral donated by Toyota, that was later replaced by a marble statue of the two characters covered by a cobblestone blanket, created by the artist Batist Vermeulen.
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- "A Dog of Flanders" | 2020-02-06 | 71 Upvotes 54 Comments
π Barometric light
Barometric light is a name for the light that is emitted by a mercury-filled barometer tube when the tube is shaken. The discovery of this phenomenon in 1675 revealed the possibility of electric lighting.
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- "Barometric light" | 2018-11-03 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments